15 After 20: A Docu-Series

Open Call: A Year in the Lives of 15 Actors | Part 1​Spring 1995. Cambridge, Mass. I witness a rare convergence. In the studios of the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard, at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, I behold the formation of a true ensemble of actors. It’s not something you see every day, not something you expect to find in school, but there it is: the second-year class—a company-in-the-making—about to graduate. I’ve been in and out of training programs as a student, then as a teacher since the mid-’70s, including at the ART. (I’m guest literary director and lecturer when I stumble on this class.) I’m not prone to romanticizing student talent. Read Full Text

Open Call: A Year in the Lives of 15 Actors | Part 2​

Fall/Winter 1995: Vontress Mitchell looks around the table in wonder.He’s sitting at the Odeon, a quintessentially hip 1980s restaurant in the Tribeca section of downtown New York. It’s a place you expect to spot artist-celebs after hours—Robert DeNiro or Jay McInerney, Deborah Harry or Mary Boone—but you don’t expect to see them sitting at your table. There they are, though, Vontress’s own kind of dream team: playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and actor/writer Wallace Shawn, Richard Price (the novelist and screenwriter who has just finished the movie Clockers), and theatre director Liz Diamond. He thinks to himself: “I’m here. This is going to take a while, but I’m here.”

Open Call: A Year in the Lives of 15 Actors | Part 3​

Spring/Summer 1996: Chandler Vinton has just finished reading Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. She has a lot of time on her hands. Although she worries that she’s not hungry enough to succeed, that she’s “hiding out from the fact that this is a business,” she also has a voice inside that says, “Make sure you’re happy.” For now, she’s happiest in her new apartment. “My definition of making it is not, ‘I’m going to L.A. to be a big star,'” she explains. “I keep trying to tell myself that that’s okay, that mine’s not less or worse than someone else’s ambition. But I’d rather sit home and read about God.”

15 After 20: Actor's Who Trained Together in the Mid-'90s and Where Are They Now | Part 1​

This is a story about time, its passage, and how it shapes lives and alters ambition. It’s also a story about the lens of time, because that lens shapes the stories we tell about our lives, too.​This story began 20 years ago, when its cast of 15 was made up of young actors, 23 to 33 years old, finishing two years of graduate work at theAmerican Repertory Theatre and its Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and heading off to New York City to embark on the rest of their careers. In other words, it began in the future tense, as each of these actors imagined and prepared for life in the profession they’d chosen and for which they’d trained.

15 After 20: Actors Move Onto New Stages, Some of Them Theatrical | Part 2​

I don’t know what I expected when I began to re-interview the American Repertory Theatre graduate acting class of 1995.I do know that last spring, when I posted on Facebook that I was doing it, my FB circle expressed both excitement and trepidation. Would the results be depressing? What would the fate of “the 15” say about the trials of other artists? What would it say about actor training? The American theatre?​One thing that did surprise me was that these actors, who were fixed in my mind as young graduate students, would go on to have such rich and compelling family lives. Tom Hughes, Randall Jaynes, James Farmer, and Jessalyn Gilsig are building lives around their children. Many of the graduates’ marriages or relationships have lasted since school or before.